Touching the Art

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Synopsis
A daringly observant memoir about intergenerational trauma, fine art, and compartmentalization from a returning Soft Skull author and Lambda Literary Award winnerA mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore&’s interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do.Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda&’s work as &“vulgar&” and a &“waste of talent&” once it became unapologetically queer.As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys&’s paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys&’s place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.Sycamore writes, &“Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over and back, over and back, welcome.&”Refusing easy answers in search of an embodied truth, Sycamore upends propriety to touch the art and feel everything that comes through.
Copyright:
2023

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9781593767365
Related ISBNs:
9781593767358
Publisher:
Catapult
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Biographies and Memoirs, Parenting and Family, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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